Rudd and Gillard in the WSJWritten by Sinclair Davidson
June 26th, 2010
"On Rudd (subscription required)
Mr. Rudd’s key political insight was that Australians liked the economic prosperity that more than two decades of continuous liberalization ushered in. That thinking was in the tradition of former Labor leaders Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, who opened the Lucky Country’s economy to the rest of the world starting in the early 1980s. But voters judged that other Labor leaders, like Mark Latham, posed a threat to that prosperity, and the party lost four successive elections.
So Labor turned to Mr. Rudd, a wonky former bureaucrat who didn’t grow up in the union movement. On the campaign trail, he called himself a “fiscal conservative” while nodding to the Labor base by promising to make the workplace “fairer.” He also adopted conservative positions on immigration and the war on terror. After 11 1/2 years of Liberal Party rule, that platform reassured voters who wanted a fresh face in the Lodge.
Once in office, however, Mr. Rudd, Ms. Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan embarked on a left-wing agenda unseen since the 1970s. With U.S. President Barack Obama’s Keynesian spending providing intellectual cover, Labor took Australia from an A$19.7 billion ($17.2 billion in today’s dollars) surplus to an A$32.1 billion deficit in a single year in the name of “stimulus” — even though the country was well insulated from the global financial crisis.
Meanwhile, the party’s left, led by Ms. Gillard, embarked on a crusade to resurrect the ebbing union movement. The government revoked flexible individual work contracts, allowed unions greater access to workplaces, and gave more power to a central commission to set wages. These policies attracted little national attention because they were structured to take effect in phases over several years.
Mr. Rudd would have done more economic damage if he could have. Following through on a campaign promise to fight global warming — which he dubbed “the great moral challenge of our generation” — he proposed a cap-and-trade scheme which would have taxed every corner of the economy. That was a step too far for moderates in the Senate, which rejected it twice. Then the bottom fell out of the global-warming movement in Copenhagen, and Mr. Rudd shelved the legislation.
…
The tipping point came earlier this year when Mr. Rudd proposed a 40% tax on the mining industry to plug the deficit hole that he and his party had created. Billions of dollars of investment were put on hold, and corporate Australia went into active opposition. Mr. Rudd’s popularity plummeted so far, so fast, that the Liberals pulled even with Labor.
On Gillard (by Janet Albrechtsen) (subscription required)
Cleverly too, Australia’s 27th prime minister implicitly acknowledged her own complicity in some of her predecessor’s mistakes. “I know the Rudd government did not do all it said it would do. And at times, it went off track.” The problem is the severity of those mistakes, for which words alone will not get her off the hook in the public’s eye. As a member of Mr. Rudd’s inner policy circle, she was particularly instrumental in crafting the unpopular mining profits tax, which Australians understand would hit one of their most important industries. But she does benefit from not having been the chief public face of those mistakes in the way Mr. Rudd as prime minister was. That might give her just enough room to gracefully pivot now that she’s seen what became of Mr. Rudd.
This will not be easy. Reworking or, better yet, repudiating that mining tax will leave a large budget hole for which Ms. Gillard herself will have been partially responsible. For instance, despite her positives as an education minister, she also oversaw an irresponsible “stimulus” spending binge of A$16.2 billion ($14 billion) in the country’s schools, something for which the Rudd government took a lot of flak. But if she has truly seen the light on the virtues of more moderate governance, she has a better shot at making the change than she would have before.
No one should underestimate Ms Gillard. Nor should they underestimate Australian voters. While the inner-city crowds of Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne will crow about gender as the defining, historic issue at the next election, many Australians are right to be suspicious of any candidate, man or woman, who once hailed from the far-left side of politics. Australians are undoubtedly ready for a female prime minister. Whether they’re ready for Ms. Gillard to be their prime minister will be a different question.
Janet Albrechtsen also had a feature in the Australian on Gillard.
Gillard, as deputy prime minister and a member of Rudd’s gang of four, played a central role in the Rudd fiasco. While, she has acknowledged the mistakes, there’s no getting away from the fact she is part of the overspending incompetence of the school buildings program, the debacle of the delay of the emissions trading system and the mining tax miscalculation. While she has opened the door to negotiations with the mining industry, she must explain a budget black hole if she changes the mining tax. While she talks now about strong border control, as opposition immigration spokeswoman in 2004 Gillard road-tested a soft-touch immigration policy that was rejected by the hard heads in Labor.
She was also part of the Latham fiasco. When Mark Latham left, Gillard described his departure as a “real vacuum on Australia’s political stage”. Her fingerprints were on the MedicareGold policy. In other words, Gillard is yet to prove herself on the policy and political judgment fronts.
The biggest political plus Gillard has is that men beating up on women looks bad in politics and everywhere else too. So the Liberals going in hard could quickly degenerate into allegations on bullying. The leader writer at the WSJ and Albrechtsen don’t face that problem. How the Liberals manage that issue will determine the outcome of the coming election."
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2010/06/26/rudd-and-gillard-in-the-wsj/
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